Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
On the evening of 4 November 1605 Guy Fawkes was found ready to blow Monarch and Parliament to Kingdom Come. But what reliable evidence is there, once we exclude the confessions extracted under torture? Was he a victim of the common practice of framing political enemies?
Torture not Treason
National Archives should do due diligence before promoting seriously inaccurate information
This is all wrong for two reasons:
1- The salacious idea that this exhibition is just about traitors. Actually, between about 1530s and 1630s it's about the torture that the English state used to extract confessions - eg from Boleyn's supposed lovers or the alleged Gunpowder Plotters. This is a much more important story than the 'treasons' they were supposed to have committed. Can we believe the evidence? What does this say about the English state?
2- National Archives suggest that the leather 'baga secretis' that is at the centre of the exhibition was the bag that originally contained the gunpowder evidence. That's a simple mistake. That bag was a buckram (cotton) bag owned by Sir Edward Coke, the Attorney General at the trial. It was found in his possession when he was dismissed in 1616 for misdemeanours. Which casts even more doubt on its contents.
National Archives, as the country’s primary documents depository, ought to do better than simply taking documents at their face value and doing none of the due diligence. It's basic good practice to ask how any document came to be written and preserved, and whether it tells us more about those who composed and kept it than the events it supposedly describes. Find out more and make your own minds up by listening to our podcast below.
‘No Gunpowder plot?’
According to government accounts, at about 11.45 p.m. on 4 November 1605 a “small party of men” discovered “a tall and desperate fellow” in the cellars of the House of Lords with 36 barrels of gunpowder, three matches and a tinderbox.
Before you light your bonfire and set off your fireworks on November 5, why not ‘spare a thought’ for Guy Fawkes, who we’re still sending up in flames, more than 400 years after the crime he’s supposed to have committed. Look for our playlist here with 7 episodes, called Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot. It's a grisly story with shady characters, state torture, spies including Shakespeare's rival Ben Jonson, and a network of men skilled at framing enemies particularly Catholics who sent Mary Queen of Scots to her death - this was called practicing or entrapment. Here is the soundtrack from a short YouTube promo. We recorded in one take in our study so we've left the hesitations in for you here. We wouldn't usually!
We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told.
We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything.
The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the money he so badly needs. Job done.
To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almost a year, before spying a handy cellar next door for the gunpowder barrels. Yes. Of course.
We dig deeper into the animosity between the king and Cecil whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father and son had spies everywhere and openly boasted of their policy of entrapment.
As his father had done, Cecil built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose father had narrowly escaped death from a gunpowder blast, this was it.
The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing.
At the time, London gossip accused the king’s chief minister Robert Cecil of fabricating the entire plot to blow up everyone who mattered and leave the country ungovernable. When Cecil died seven years later, he was remembered as lying and self-serving. ‘The King’s misuser, the Parliament’s abuser, Hath left his plotting… is now a rotting.’ On the first anniversary, 5 November 1606, people were forced to celebrate by going to church and lighting bonfires. Anti-Catholic sentiment has kept the anniversary alive. But if the Gunpowder plot was the invention of a vicious, torturing and intolerant regime, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating it any more?
What reliable evidence is there, once we exclude all the confessions extracted under torture? We explore the common practice of framing political enemies which was at the heart of the English court from the 1570s to the 1600s.
Our podcast should be described by historians as a ‘postmodern’ analysis of the Gunpowder Plot. Instead of just telling the story, we’ve explored it through ‘discourses’ that inform it. In other words, the ideas and circumstances of the people who were caught up in what happened.
What, for example, was happening in Robert Cecil’s life?
What is the history of rebellions?
What were the Jesuits trying to achieve?
This is a particularly helpful approach in a case like this when the documents can’t be taken at face value.
Most of the books written about the Gunpowder Plot, however, just tell the story and largely ignore the problem with the documents. The easiest long book to read is still Antonia Fraser’s The Gunpowder Plot (1996). She tells all the usual stories and you get a lot of the background too.
James Travers’s Gunpowder (2005) is the best place to find documents, some in facsimile.
James Sharpe’s Remember, Remember (2005) is your source for the history of 5 November after 1605. There were, of course, a lot of books about the Gunpowder Plot in 2005.
Alice Hogge’s God’s Secret Agents is perhaps the best because it draws in new material, especially about the priests and the Spanish. She thinks there was a genuine gunpowder plot but agrees with us that Cecil then cleverly manipulated it for his own ends.
If you want to dig deeper, you will have to look at Mark Nicholls’s Investigating Gunpowder Plot (1991). It’s so far the only academic book on the subject but it simply assumes that the plot was completely genuine and that the confessions are accurate, torture or no torture. Nicholls also tells you very little about Robert Cecil.
Although Cecil’s papers have survived, nobody has been able to face writing a biography of the man. The closest is Pauline Croft’s various books and articles, including Patronage, Culture and Power (2002) and King James (2003). See also Alexandra Walsham’s Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (2014) for the Catholic background.
The historian who spent most time trying to prove that Cecil invented the whole thing was Francis Edwards. His Enigma of the Gunpowder Plot 1605 (2008) sums up a lifetime’s work. He believed that Catesby and several of the other plotters were working all along for Cecil. Although the book contains many intriguing details, he makes too many assumptions to be convincing. Edwards also translated Tesimond’s Narrative (1973) which is a good read, so long as you remember that a lot of it is copied from Government sources and that it’s intended to clear the Jesuits of blame. Tesimond knew many of the characters personally. But it’s hard to see how much of it – colourful details for example about the tunnelling – can be anything other than made up.
The best website is here. It includes many facsimile documents and sensible articles.
The summarized calendar of the State Papers is here and is the next best thing to reading the original documents.
The same goes for the calendar of Cecil’s papers, which is here.
There’s a good selection of articles on James’s Parliaments here.